Web Tools For The Digital World

WordPress Plugins

This is a list of plugins used by students in their group and individual projects. The plugin name should link to the plugin site and the descriptions should follow this syntax and be in alphabetical order by plugin:

Plugin – Description/rationale – Student Name

2010 Plugins

Akismet – Takes comments from your posts and measures them against a web service that recognizes spam. If it looks like spam, it wont display the comment. I use this to protect my site from being spammed and to help validate the content on the blog. – Elise, Scott Loughran

Disqus Comment System – Replaces WP comment system, allowing several login systems for users to self-identify more easily. I hope that the content on our blog sparks conversation and encourages people to ask questions. Lengthy validation processes for comments stops people from making them and hopefully the quick connect options will help with the encouragement. – Scott Loughran

Favicon Manager – Places a little image next to your domain name in the URL box. I feel this helps add individuality and establishes brand better than the generic WP default favicon. The favicon was generated by uploading a PNG file to http://www.favicon.cc/. – Scott Loughran

FD Feedburner Plugin – Redirects all of your sites feeds back to a Feedburner feed. I like this idea as Feedburner is now a Google entity and allows me to integrate AdWord campaigns and measure feed performance much like Analytics. – Scott Loughran

Gcal Sidebar – A widget that puts a feed from a Google calendar. – Stephen

Google Analytics for WordPress – Easy way to copy/paste your Analytics UA# for automatic metrics. Analytics is important in understand the behavior of your audience. This plugin took out the need to copy/paste code, on your UA#. – Scott Loughran

JR Ratings – This plugin allows you to enable a rating form where users can rate a particular post. – Holly

JR YouTube – This YouTube plugin allows you to show your recently listened uploaded YouTube videos, and display them in a list as a widget on your blog. – Holly

Keyword Statistics – Takes all the content from your post and creates a suggested keyword list based on the 10 words that appear most often in your post. I have a hard time generating tags, so this plugin helps me come up with relevant tags. – Elise, Scott Loughran

MM Forms – A fully customizable online form creation tool. It also stores information gathered from forms in a database and has the option to email to a user. – Stephen

My Page Order – A tool that allows a use to organize pages and subpages by dragging and dropping. – Stephen

NextGEN Gallery – A gallery plug-in that displays a slide show of pictures with multiple features such as transitions, arrows, thumbnail navigation. – Stephen

Share and Follow – A split plugin. “Share” lets you select from the most popular sharing options in icon format at the bottom of each post. “Follow” uses the same icon format in the sidebar to allow users to subscribe to your feeds via the channel of their choice. I am a firm believer that your inability to provide options to your audience will give your audience the ability to leave. To add other sharing channels no accounts are needed and the follow links in the side bar operate of off links, not feeds so it doesn’t interfere with my RSS. – Holly, Scott Loughran

Tweet Blender – Twitter integration for the sidebar, allowing tweets, tweets relevant to post’s tags, Twitter list, hashtags and keyword searches. I wanted people to be able to see the conversation Twitter so they can be encourage to follow us there as well. – Scott Loughran

wp-Typography – Helps make your text look pretty and uniform amongst various formatting differences between languages and OSs. I haven’t found a situation where this plugin helps, so either it’s doing its’ job really well or its’ not that necessary. – Scott Loughran

WPtouch iPhone Theme – Provides mobile themes for your site to display more friendly on touch-based smartphones. It takes the customization of my theme away from the content, but makes the content much more friendly to browse. It does give users the option to divert back to the original theme. – Scott Loughran